Coming next teaser... (Patreon)

I just started editing my second trip to the headphone boutique from yesterday and I am pretty excited to share my first rough edit of what I shot. It's just the first song played as for now, there will be 3 other songs in the final video..

The Kii Three speakers in the shown setup cost around €40000, the Dan Clark Stealh headphone around €4000.  My idea was to compare the perceived responses of these two, as the Kii Three speakers are regarded as ultimate studio monitors therefore are supposed to sound neutral, while the Stealh is striclty tuned towards the Harman target according to the first pulished measurements.  The Harman target on the other hand should represent neutral speakers in a room, thus both should sound similar... you got the idea?

As I always had the impression as if this target sounded off, I just wanted to prove my theory by also throwing the Focal Elex into the game which I personally would definitely regard at a more neutral side. I couldn't do a lot of live comparisons as there was not that much time, therefore I simply recorded the whole test by capturing all 3 sources to be able to listen to them more carefully and more in detail at home. I also have pink noise and several songs recorded for all of them, thus I can also create different kinds of videos and also simulate all kinds of measuremnts, like comparing the speakers to the Stealh and to the Elex back and forth (like in this video here), or showing the deviation between Stealh to speakers and Elex to speakers, comparing the Stealth to the Elex directly, or trying to equalize both headphones to the captured sound of the speakers and listen again if some differences between both headphones will remain... (2 different responses equalized to the same response should sound the same in terms of frequency response, but are other aspects of the sound captured as well (speed, imaging, slam... blah blah)?

I am not sure yet which headphone represents the sound of the speakers in a better way, or to put it differntly: which headphone sounds more similar to how the speakers sound, but I was actually speechless how bad the Stealh sounded to me. First of all the sound varies extremely dependent on how you put it on. The earpads are extremely big and you can move the headphone around like on a rollercoaster, but I couldn't find a single position which would sound acceptable to me and the best one I managed to find was very uncomfortable and not consistent as the headphone tended to slip down to another position after some time (also this issue will be shown in this video). To me the Stealth had some weird treble coloration which sounded really cheap. There was no single element or aspect within the sound which would somehow capture my attention, it sounded just cheap and off to me, I cannot quite explain the high praise about it already posted in many forums and youtube reviews.  The Elex sounded way more detailed and more natural to me and although not perfectly close to the speakers, the Elex definitely appeared closer to me than the Stealh. 

I just wanted to know your opinion what you think about this and how you perceive them all. Unfortunately the room acoustics is really bad in this store, therefore I would love to repeat something like that in a much better controlled enviroment. If you know some professional music studio in Austria that would be willing to provide some time for such a test, please let me know. It's quite an interesting topic for me as I simply want to find the best possible target for any future projects with headphones or IEMs. I always perceived the HD600, Elex, Etymotic, etc as fairly neutral sounding but maybe this target can be even improved and fine tuned a bit more. 

If I finally manage to find this "perfect target", I would like to repeat the same procedure with someone else's ears. This would mean measuring the same flat speakers and the same headphone tuned towards this magic target and then measure the delta between his ears and mine for both speakers and headphones. There will be differences for sure (like I have formerly shown with a measurement of the Meze Emyprean done with my own ears and with the ears from Oratory1990) but the question is if the deviation of both our ears will be the same for both speaker and headphone. The consequence could be a better general target averaged over measurements of different ears unlike some preferred response based on listening and adjusting sliders by some untrained listeners.

Or I could simply ignore everything and simply say: "The Dan Clark Stealh is one of the worst headphones I have heard for $4000", while others claim it's the best... who is actually saying the truth. Or are there different truths? I wand to know if others really perceive it decent sounding because they hearing is so different to what I hear, or if there are other factors to be considered. I need to find arguments, why I think it's bad, and this is the only way to really back up my claims. 

The more I listened inside the store and tried other headphones like the Grado RS-1, or the Master&Dynamic MW65 that I always loved because of its classy looks, they both sounded so unbelievably bad, I wouldn't even want to spend $30 for such a sound. On the other hand I finally found a headphone which I really liked most: The Focal Utopia, but go figure, it looks and sounds nearly the same as the Elex but costs 6 times as much. The best thing: I was allowed to take the Utopia over the weekend and I want to compare it to the Elex directly with another after midnight listening session... 

Everything is becoming really more and more mysterious to me the more I am trying to dig into this audiophile headphone world...